“I’m not arguing for the end of the world – but then again, maybe I am,” accused witch Elizabeth Sawyer tells us in the monologue that opens Jen Silverman’s Witch. In an eerie red light, after a screaming heavy metal intro, this assessment — aimed from way back in the early 1600s — lands like a lit match in dry brush.
Witch is a stunning, jagged shard of theatrical originality that rips a gaping wound in time, space, voice, convention and expectation, in order to comment on the politics of gender, sexuality and societal immobility. And it poses — hypothetically at first, but then more nakedly, brashly and even seductively — this most urgent and most existential question of all, some version of which surely niggles, teases, or confronts most of us in the world gone mad that is 2026.
This funny and thought-provoking play, running at Soulpepper’s Michael Young Theatre until March 1, 2026, is a razor-edged modern re-fashioning of Thomas Dekker, John Ford and William Rowley’s 1621 Jacobean shocker The Witch of Edmonton. That play was itself sparked by the fate of the historical Elizabeth Sawyer, who was an impoverished and disabled woman hounded into infamy, tried, and then executed — thanks to a village’s voracious appetite for casting aspersions.
Silverman keeps certain key elements of the overstuffed dramatic original: the scapegoated Sawyer, her supposed bargain with the devil, the corrupt gravity well of a philandering local noble’s household, and a seemingly incorruptible dancing innocent. But she simplifies the play’s sprawling cast, and fracture-fuses the story into cleverly linked twin plots. The first orbits the ostracized witch, while the other spirals through considerations of inheritance, desire, and moral opportunism among the “respectable” family of nobleman Sir Arthur Banks (Oliver Dennis).
The devil (Nicholas Eddie), here known as Scratch, is one link between the plots: as an equal-opportunity tempter, he is pitching not just for Sawyer’s soul, but for the souls of those we meet in the Banks’ household, including Banks’ heir Cuddy Banks (Thomas Mitchell Barnet) and Banks’ preferred choice Frank Thorney (Shawn Ahmed). A second link is a cycle of repetition that connects Sawyer’s ostracism to the current predicament of Banks’ maid Winnifred (Heeyun Park 박희윤) — a revelation which substantially abets Sawyer’s opening argument.
One marvel of the play and production is how thoroughly they thwart expectation. First off, it bears repeating that this is an extraordinarily funny and modern-feeling experience. The dialogue is delightfully contemporary, and the anachronism collapses any sense of physical and temporal distance.
Knowing the basics of the backstory, I expected we would experience some of the injustices heaped on the infamous Witch of Edmonton. This background is discussed, but never shown. Instead of others’ attempts to define and reduce her, the foreground is Sawyer herself –- embodied wearily, laconically, and incisively by a glorious Tantoo Cardinal. Witch is interested in her reflections, her responses, her observations … and most of all her ideas. Creativity loves constraint – and the viciously gendered, class-based, ageist, ableist constraints that have brought crushing weight to bear on her life have unleashed her creativity. And it is radical.
I also expected to see the story of Sawyer’s deal with The Devil … and once again, I was surprised. Yes, the infernal trickster is ever-present: Eddie is marvellous in the role, from the moment he first unfolds his menacingly tall frame to the way he prowls the stage and peppers the characters with circuitous pitches for their souls. Though equal parts deception and amused menace, his wickedly funny seductions seem to become curdled by his curiosity … and the rising sense of his constraints. And in the end, this turns instead into the story of a devil’s temptation … by the shackle-slipping Sawyer.
Around these two, the “polite” world of Sir Arthur Banks’ household combusts — even as, in a quartet of marvellous performances, its inhabitants reveal edges that illuminate their constraints and their sometimes surprising resistance of them. Barnet’s wonderfully awkward Cuddy Banks is a simple soul pushing achingly against class and gender scripts. His Morris dancing pratfalls and comic lust shade almost alchemically into wistful, genuine longing. Meanwhile, Shawn Ahmed threads Frank Thorney’s ambition with ironclad need: his choices sting the most, because they feel inevitable.
And Oliver Dennis rules as Sir Arthur Banks –- deliciously both less and more than we at first assume, as the nexus of especially tangled relations with son Cuddy, aspiring ward Frank, and the dead wife he hoists around in her urn. Finally, Heeyun Park 박희윤 gives a flinty warmth to the maid Winnifred, who flits continuously through this space to attend to Banks’ needs. Invisible no matter what she does, drops or says, she wins a hard-won clarity that ultimately cuts through the fog of the male characters’ various rationalizations. When she delivers her bitter assessment in her monologue late in the play, it’s both a devastating counterpoint to — and a validation of — Sawyer’s opening statement.
Director Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster masterfully orchestrates the action so it is fluid yet clear: volleying scenes so that the plots echo and taunt one another. And Nick Blais’s design is immersive in the simple way it makes the poles of class and story material. Sir Arthur’s “estate” is distilled to a throne-like chair with the urn and sundry domestic tokens at one end of the stage, while Elizabeth’s space is pared down to a pelted bench, hanging lantern, kitchen implements, and rough-hewn textures. Between the two, a stone floor surrounds a glowing, liminal depression where characters variously sit, cook, chase and circle. Sometimes hearth, sometimes furniture, sometimes vortex, this all-world portal seems to deconstruct superficial differences of time, place, and station. And Jareth Li’s lighting and Olivia Wheeler’s sound design and composition bridge the extremes, stitching cold power and hot survival with pulsing color and brash, modern sonics.
No matter what you expect from a synopsis or its Jacobean origins, you are certain to be surprised, engrossed and provoked by this incendiary brew, in which characters constrained by visibility, opportunity, and possibility strain to become themselves before our eyes … and give loud, long voice to the realizations wrung from those constraints.
If Erin Shields’s Ransacking Troy felt elegiac and wistful in its feminist reimagining of even older male texts, Witch is unsentimental, radical, and provocative. Witch makes you laugh — hard. It challenges you –- hard. And it means — with intensity.
In its myriad contradictions, it works exquisitely as both a story and a production. And that ending? It doesn’t adjudicate. It slides the fuse into your lap, and dares you to choose which world — the constraint-dense old order that Sawyer so stoutly resists, or the unseen one that she imagines could follow it — you’re willing to let burn.
Witch continues at Soulpepper until March 1, 2026. Tickets are available at soulpepper.ca.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
